What is a Quark Star?

Quark is a hypothetical star that is thought to be formed by strong interactions. According to the theory, when a star dies, it will collapse under the influence of its own gravity. If its mass is medium, that is, about 1.44 times more than the mass of the sun, gravity is enough to squeeze the electrons and protons in the material of the star together to form a neutron star. If the star is more massive, the neutron may break into its own constituent, quark. Under a certain pressure, half of the quarks separated from neutrons can be converted into odd quarks, resulting in a more dense type of matter. At this time, the celestial body is a "quark star" composed of odd quarks.

Quark Star is made up of

There are at least three types of stars based on the quark level in the theoretical model, "singular quark star", "soliton star" and "Bose star" ^[1]

The structure of the quark star is actually very simple, unlike

Some doctrines suggest that "strange matter" may be

Astronomers have announced that a rare high-luminance stellar explosion may have led to the creation of a new type of matter, commonly known as quark stars. The existence of quark stars, and the existence of quarks, is a major issue in astronomy.

The conventional wisdom so far has been that quark stars should be smaller than neutron stars. This seems reasonable, because the quark star is further collapsed on the basis of neutron stars, which makes the matter in it denser and the volume occupied by it will decrease. But according to the latest calculations by an international cooperation group of German, Swiss, and American scientists, quark stars may actually be larger than their cousin neutron stars. But how is this possible?

These complex calculations involve the "equation of state" of neutron stars and quarks, which describe the nature of the materials that make up these two types of objects. Their calculations show that a quark star 2.5 times the mass of the sun will be larger than a neutron star 2 times the mass of the sun.

This discovery is very interesting for finding potential quarks. If astronomers found a large neutron star with 2.5 solar masses, maybe they really saw a quark star.

Once a quark star is discovered, it is of great significance not only for astronomers, but also for physicists working at the European Nuclear Centre, where they can obtain a wealth of information on naturally occurring "strange quark matter". Although the Large Hadron Collider can produce high-temperature "quark gluon plasma," strange quark matter has not yet been produced in the laboratory, so the discovery of quark stars will benefit astrophysicists and particle physicists. ^[2]